This is something I just stumbled across...
... and as I think it's a really fitting analogy (why yes, sometimes C.S.Lewis says intelligent things!) and it goes with something that I often notice in discussions of my main fandom (and sometimes even within the fandom), I thought I'd just post it here for you to share and also for me to remember...
"There are two ways of enjoying the past, as there are two ways of enjoying a foreign country. One man carries his Englishry abroad with him and brings it home unchanged. Wherever he goes he consorts with the other English tourists. By a good hotel he means one that is like an English hotel. He complains of the bad tea where he might have had excellent coffee. He finds the 'natives' quaint and enjoys their quaintness. In his own way he may have a pleasant time; he likes his winter-sports in Switzerland and his flutter at Monte Carlo. In the same way there is a man who carries his modernity with him through all his reading of past literatures and preserves it intact. The highlights in all ancient and medieval poetry are for him the bits that resemble - or can be so read that they seem to resemble - the poetry of his own age...
But there is another sort of travelling and another sort of reading. You can eat the local food and drink the local wines, you can share the foreign life, you can begin to see the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourists, but to its inhabitants. You can come home modified, thinking and feeling as you did not think and feel before. So with the old literature. You can go beyond the first impression that a poem makes on your modern sensibility. By study of things outside the poem, by comparing it with other poems, by steeping yourself in the vanished period, you cn then re-enter the poem with eyes more like those of the natives; now perhaps seeing that the associations you gave to the old words were false, that the real implications were different from what you supposed, that what you thought was strange was then ordinary and that what seemed to you ordinary was then strange."
~ C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, quoted in Studies on the Narrative Technique of Beowulf and Lawman's Brut by Håkan Ringbom
Hah! Lewis, trailblazer of cultural relativism! I stand amazed.
And isn't this too true. I kind of want to pin that to the office walls of quite a lot of literary critics... and this one, too:
"The reader who is content with his subjective reactions alone runs the risk of interpreting the work of art in a fashion which would evoke peals of laughter from the author. He also shows his lack of interest in the creative process which produced the work of art." ~R.S.Loomis, this time.
Hell yes. Judge medieval (or pseudo-medieval) literature by modern or post-modern standards all you want, biatches, but know that it only makes you look stupid sadly uneducated on backgrounds and intentions.
*coughs* Sorry. Back to my paper, yesyes.
"There are two ways of enjoying the past, as there are two ways of enjoying a foreign country. One man carries his Englishry abroad with him and brings it home unchanged. Wherever he goes he consorts with the other English tourists. By a good hotel he means one that is like an English hotel. He complains of the bad tea where he might have had excellent coffee. He finds the 'natives' quaint and enjoys their quaintness. In his own way he may have a pleasant time; he likes his winter-sports in Switzerland and his flutter at Monte Carlo. In the same way there is a man who carries his modernity with him through all his reading of past literatures and preserves it intact. The highlights in all ancient and medieval poetry are for him the bits that resemble - or can be so read that they seem to resemble - the poetry of his own age...
But there is another sort of travelling and another sort of reading. You can eat the local food and drink the local wines, you can share the foreign life, you can begin to see the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourists, but to its inhabitants. You can come home modified, thinking and feeling as you did not think and feel before. So with the old literature. You can go beyond the first impression that a poem makes on your modern sensibility. By study of things outside the poem, by comparing it with other poems, by steeping yourself in the vanished period, you cn then re-enter the poem with eyes more like those of the natives; now perhaps seeing that the associations you gave to the old words were false, that the real implications were different from what you supposed, that what you thought was strange was then ordinary and that what seemed to you ordinary was then strange."
~ C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, quoted in Studies on the Narrative Technique of Beowulf and Lawman's Brut by Håkan Ringbom
Hah! Lewis, trailblazer of cultural relativism! I stand amazed.
And isn't this too true. I kind of want to pin that to the office walls of quite a lot of literary critics... and this one, too:
"The reader who is content with his subjective reactions alone runs the risk of interpreting the work of art in a fashion which would evoke peals of laughter from the author. He also shows his lack of interest in the creative process which produced the work of art." ~R.S.Loomis, this time.
Hell yes. Judge medieval (or pseudo-medieval) literature by modern or post-modern standards all you want, biatches, but know that it only makes you look stupid sadly uneducated on backgrounds and intentions.
*coughs* Sorry. Back to my paper, yesyes.